Although observations upon little children lend themselves, without
being forced, to the proposed interpretation, they do not carry the full
conviction which psychoanalyses of adult neurotics obtrude upon the
physician. The dreams in question are here cited with introductions of
such a nature that their interpretation as wish-dreams becomes
unavoidable. One day I find a lady sad and weeping. She says: “I do not
want to see my relatives any more; they must shudder at me.” Thereupon,
almost without any transition, she tells that she remembers a dream,
whose significance, of course, she does not know. She dreamed it four
years before, and it is as follows: _A fox or a lynx is taking a walk on
the roof; then something falls down, or she falls down, and after that
her mother is carried out of the house dead_—whereat the dreamer cries
bitterly. No sooner had I informed her that this dream must signify a
wish from her childhood to see her mother dead, and that it is because
of this dream that she thinks that her relatives must shudder at her,
than she furnished some material for explaining the dream. “Lynx-eye” is
an opprobrious epithet which a street boy once bestowed on her when she
was a very small child; when she was three years old a brick had fallen
on her mother’s head so that she bled severely.
I once had opportunity to make a thorough study of a young girl who
underwent several psychic states. In the state of frenzied excitement
with which the illness started, the patient showed a very strong
aversion to her mother; she struck and scolded her as soon as she
approached the bed, while at the same time she remained loving and
obedient to a much older sister. Then there followed a clear but
somewhat apathetic state with very much disturbed sleep. It was in this
phase that I began to treat her and to analyse her dreams. An enormous
number of these dealt in a more or less abstruse manner with the death
of the mother; now she was present at the funeral of an old woman, now
she saw her sisters sitting at the table dressed in mourning; the
meaning of the dreams could not be doubted. During the further progress
of the convalescence hysterical phobias appeared; the most torturing of
these was the idea that something happened to her mother. She was always
having to hurry home from wherever she happened to be in order to
convince herself that her mother was still alive. Now this case, in view
of my other experiences, was very instructive; it showed in polyglot
translations, as it were, the different ways in which the psychic
apparatus reacts to the same exciting idea. In the state of excitement
which I conceive as the overpowering of the second psychic instance, the
unconscious enmity towards the mother became potent as a motor impulse;
then, after calmness set in, following the suppression of the tumult,
and after the domination of the censor had been restored, this feeling
of enmity had access only to the province of dreams in order to realise
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